Diversity

It's improving, but it's still not great.

My first Dragonmeet was in 2005 and to say it was male dominated would be an understatement. I don't think I was the only woman there, but it was pretty close. The next two years I did see other women there, but we were still very much the minority.

Fourteen years later, and while I haven't been to Dragonmeet for a while, when I do go to a convention, things haven't moved as much as I would have hoped. There are more women, but I can't help comparing these events with larp events, where the gender balance is still weighted on the male side but is a lot closer to equality.

It's possible this is just due to limited sample size - but I've been looking at other conventions recently with a view to attending more of them, and specifically at the offered games and the names of the GMs. The only one where I've actually spotted female names among the GMs is Concrete Cow, where both me and Amy from the MK club run games.

I wonder if there's a more eclectic crowd at really big events like UKGE? There's certainly a reasonable gender mix in the trade hall, but then board gaming doesn't seem to be male dominated in the same way as RPGs. I'd be interested to know if this is the case.

(Facebook comments tell me that UKGE does have a lot more female players.)

I've only talked about gender, because it's the one area of diversity of which I'm acutely aware. I absolutely notice when I walk into a convention and there's not another woman in sight. You're going to get a much better assessment of racial diversity from someone who's not white (although my impression is that RPG conventions are even whiter than they are male.)

What can we do about it? On a personal level, I can keep doing what I'm doing. My presence tells any other woman who walks in that she's not alone. Running a game means there's someone with an unambiguously female name on the GM roster. On an organisational level, harassment policies are great, and enforcing them is even better. The way UKGE handled the incident this year means I'm confident that I'd be taken seriously if I had a problem there.

But what can you, hypothetical reader who is an RPG player and probably a man, do personally to improve the gender balance?

Inviting women to play RPGs seems like a good start. More women in gaming means more women to potentially show up at conventions. There are RPGs for pretty much anything - fantasy, sci-fi, steampunk, superheroes - so there's bound to be something that will appeal. It might take some initial scheduling, since women tend to get stuck with childcare more often than men, but it's not like it's hard to get people hooked on RPGs.

One thing that matters to me in convention games is that I'm not limited in what I can play based on gender. I like to play female characters, and was somewhat annoyed in one game set in Victorian Britain when I drew the army captain character, and was told that because of the setting that they had to be a man. (Accordingly I named him Captain James Tiptree. That particular detail never came up in the game, but it made me feel better.)

Much better, in my opinion, to take the Alien approach and create an interesting set of pre-gens without assigning any of them a gender, and let the player decide what they want to do with it. Perhaps a character you initially imagined as male gets played as a woman. Perhaps that means you end up with someone as awesome as Ellen Ripley.

And if you must have full pre-gens (like if you're using the characters from an existing IP) make sure there's some female options.

If I feel welcome, I'll come back. And maybe I'll bring friends.